Who Is John Waters?
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TEACHER'S GUIDE TO DEAR TEACHERS, This resource is designed to introduce you and your students to John Waters: Indecent Exposure, the first retrospective of John Waters’s visual arts career in his hometown of Baltimore. NOTE: The content and themes of John Waters’s work may not be appropriate for young students. This guide has been written with high school teachers and their students in mind. LESSONS IN THIS RESOURCE CONTAIN THE FOLLOWING: CLOSE LOOKING: • An exploration of the artworks’ visual elements. ART IN CONTEXT: • Information about multiple contexts (historical, art historical, social, cultural, etc.) in which the artworks were made. CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES: • Recommended for high school students; activities lead students in close looking and engage them in important concepts related to the artworks. Each activity is tied to relevant standards from the National Core Arts Standards— Creating, Presenting, Responding, and Connecting. LESSONS SUPPORT THE FOLLOWING 21ST CENTURY SKILLS: • Communication and Collaboration • Creativity and Innovation • Critical Thinking and Problem Solving • Flexibility and Adaptability • Initiative and Self-Direction • Leadership and Responsibility • Productivity and Accountability • Social and Cross-Cultural Skills Please note that the John Waters: Indecent Exposure exhibition is open through January 6, 2019. Tours of the exhibition for high school students may be scheduled by completing a tour request form found at www.artbma.org/educators/index.html. We hope this guide provides inspiration and helpful strategies to engage you and your students with the work of John Waters. SUZY WOLFFE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS RESEARCHER AND WRITER Suzy Wolffe Manager of Tour Experiences Design by Nicole Miller, Graphic Designer Special thanks to John Waters and Kristen Hileman, Senior Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art, for their guidance. Additional thanks to Elizabeth Benskin, Director of School and Teacher Programs, and Jennifer Nelson, Publications Editor, for their assistance. The John Waters: Indecent Exposure exhibition has been generously supported by The Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Foundation, Suzanne F. Cohen, Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, Clair Zamoiski Segal, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Constance R. Caplan, Agnes Gund, Martha and Tad Glenn, Amy and Marc Meadows, The Pearlstone Family Fund, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, and Sherry and Stuart Christhilf. ©2018 The Baltimore Museum of Art All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS Who is John Waters?. 8 The Baltimore Effect. 14 Storyboards. 24 The Trash Aesthetic . 28 Pop Culture. 32 Art World Critiques. 36 ARTBMA.ORG | 7 WHO IS JOHN WATERS? “HAVING [A] CREATIVE LITTLE SAFE AREA IN MY CHILDHOOD HOME GAVE ME THE CONFIDENCE TO GROW INTO LATER NEUROTIC MATURITY AND HAPPINESS.”1 CLOSE LOOKING JOHN JR. Although John Jr. appears to be a framed pastel drawing of John Waters as a young boy, it is not. It is a photograph taken in 2009 of both the original John Waters was not the first artist to frame and the pastel drawing commissioned years prior by his parents. humorously subvert an image by adding facial hair. In 1919 artist Marcel Duchamp Close looking at the photograph reveals a humorous addition. Waters’s drew a mustache and beard on an signature pencil-thin mustache was drawn on the image. A photo was taken inexpensive postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and named of the image and its original frame, and that image was then framed with a it L.H.O.O.Q. The letters, said in French, white mat and brown wooden frame that closely resembles the original frame. create a vulgar expression meaning, “She is hot in the ass.” 1 John Waters, “My Childhood Home: A Paean to the Strange Suburbs of Baltimore,” www.laphamsquarterly.org/my-childhood-home 2 John Waters, interviewed by Sandy Goldberg (sg scripts) at WYPR studios, Baltimore, MD, April 26, 2018. 8 | Baltimore Museum of Art © 2018 WHO IS JOHN WATERS? ZAPRUDER The black-and-white images of the Zapruder series look like film stills from the amateur camera footage shot in Dallas by Abraham Zapruder, a bystander who unwittingly filmed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr. But they are not from Zapruder’s footage. Instead, the images are taken from a reenactment of the assassination that was included in Waters’s film, Eat Your Makeup, made in 1968, five years after the real event. Waters revisited Eat Your Makeup in 1995 by playing the VHS tape on TV and shooting still photographs of the film. These images, edited and placed in sequence, form the artwork Waters named Zapruder, after the man who filmed the motorcade. Two of the images are pictured here. Waters commented that shooting photos off the TV screen created a grainy effect that looked weirdly similar to the 2 original assassination footage shot in Dallas. PICTURED LEFT: John Waters. John Jr. 2009. Chromogenic print in artist's frame. Image: 32 1/2 x 26 in. (82.5 x 66 cm.) Framed: 40 x 34 in. (101.6 x 86.4 cm.) The Baltimore Museum of Art, Gift of Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, BMA 2010.13. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery; PICTURED CENTER: Marcel Duchamp. L.H.O.O.Q., From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (Box in a Valise) (de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (Boîte-en-Valise)). 1935-1941 (contents); 1938 (collotype); deluxe edition, Series A, 1943. Made in Paris, France, and made in New York, New York, United States. Brown leather valise with handle containing sixty-nine miniature replicas and printed reproductions and one original, Virgin (No. 2), 1938, hand-colored collotype. Valise (closed): 16 x 14 3/4 x 4 1/4 inches (40.6 x 37.5 x 10.8 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-934 © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2018; PICTURED ABOVE: John Waters. Zapruder. 1995. Twenty-four chromogenic prints in two sections. Each image: 3 1/2 × 5 in. (8.9 × 12.7 cm.) First section, framed: 7 1/8 × 86 1/2 in. (2.9 × 219.7 cm.) Second section, framed: 7 1/8 × 36 3/8 in. (18.1 × 92.4 cm.) Estate of Jean Stein. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery ARTBMA.ORG | 9 WHO IS JOHN WATERS? KEY TERMS ART IN CONTEXT In the movie Eat Your Makeup, some scenes featured Waters’s friend Glenn Milstead playing the role of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Milstead and other actor friends filmed the assassination scenes one Sunday morning in front of Waters’s home. Many people found the idea of recreating the event tasteless and shocking coming only five years after the President’s death. Yet shock value delights Waters, who privileges “the idea of getting people’s attention 3 by saying something horrifying.” Waters was born in Baltimore and raised in a Roman-Catholic, middle-class home that was outwardly conventional, but his love of spectacle and things irreverent and transgressive began at a young age. His parents, who both embraced and questioned his eccentricities, built a small stage outside his bedroom where he acted, danced, and created over-the-top personas using 4 cast-off clothes from his mother’s friends. At the age of ten, Waters, already a fan of pop culture and star power, fell in love with Elvis when he saw the singer’s gyrations on the Ed Sullivan Show. At that moment, Waters said, he knew he was gay and relished imitating 5 Elvis’s performances on his homemade stage. He also emulated Little Richard’s extravagant displays and, later in his 20s, copied the performer’s iconic mustache because, Waters says, “I just thought he was so alarming. 6 He scared my parents.” Young Waters’s taste for shock value and dark humor was evident early when he built "John Waters’s Horror House” in his parents’ garage. While the space had the requisite rubber body parts covered in fake blood, hanging witches, dry ice, and skeletons illuminated by flashlights, this was no ordinary backyard haunted house. To make the spectacle more dangerous and terrifying, Waters shot powder from a fire extinguisher and installed trip wires so that neighborhood children fell down as they attempted to walk around in the dark. Waters calls his family home his “launching pad to creative filth” and credits his parents for allowing him to turn the house into “the demented childhood 7 amusement park that lived inside [his] brain.” 3 “Wolfgang Tillmans in Conversation with John Waters,” in Indecent Exposure, ed. Kristen Hileman. (Baltimore: The Baltimore Museum of Art, 2018), 162. 4 Waters, “My Childhood Home: A Paean to the Strange Suburbs of Baltimore,” www.laphamsquarterly.org/my-childhood-home 5 Waters, “My Childhood Home: A Paean to the Strange Suburbs of Baltimore,” www.laphamsquarterly.org/my-childhood-home 6 Kirsten Fawcett, “15 Filthy Facts About John Waters,” http://mentalfloss.com/article/70941/15-filthy-facts-about-john-waters 7 Waters, “My Childhood Home: A Paean to the Strange Suburbs of Baltimore,” www.laphamsquarterly.org/my-childhood-home 10 | Baltimore Museum of Art © 2018 WHO IS JOHN WATERS? John Waters. John Jr. 2009. Chromogenic print in artist‘s frame. Image: 32 1/2 x 26 in. (82.5 x 66 cm.) Framed: 40 x 34 in. (101.6 x 86.4 cm.) The Baltimore Museum of Art, Gift of Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker, BMA 2010.13. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery ARTBMA.ORG | 11 WHO IS JOHN WATERS? KEY TERMS Marcel Duchamp. L.H.O.O.Q., From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (Box in a Valise) (de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (Boîte-en-Valise)).